The Last Compromise

by Reevik, Carl

  15

  It was a fresh new morning, and Inspector Didier Becker was smoking in his office. These e-cigarettes were a miracle of technological progress, as far as he was concerned. If only they could do something about the food, too. He had started sweating just walking to the elevator. He should be doing something about his weight.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the roar of a cargo plane taking off. His department was housed in a police complex right next to Luxembourg airport. They had all gotten used to the noise, but sometimes the really big planes still made them crane their necks and look out the window. Some had gotten good at predicting in which direction they’d lift off; it depended on where the wind was coming from. Today the sky was overcast and the wind came probably from all directions, so it didn’t matter much to the pilots whether it was left to right to right to left.

  So, where were we. Becker was investigating the dead man Zayek, but that wasn’t the only case he had. He also still had the disappearance case, but that wasn’t very urgent because it was clear that the child hadn’t disappeared. The mother had just taken her son away from the father. Becker had talked to the father, and concluded that the mother had done absolutely the right thing. Or rather the second best thing. The best would have been to press charges against the father and remove him, instead of removing herself and her child. Better still would have been for the father to be normal and live together with his family. That would have been just perfect.

  But you can’t always have that, Becker thought. Even when the father was a normal person, like he’d been. He thought back to the family he’d once had. It simply hadn’t been a happy marriage. There’d never been any violence, no scandals, no affairs, no nothing. They had been unhappy, and at some point they’d said what they both had known. The time had come for one of them to leave.

  ‘Any messages from pathology or the chemicals lab?’, Becker shouted through the open door to the unit secretary.

  The answer was a little soprano song. ‘No-oh!’

  ‘Any witnesses from the consultancy? Tamberg or Tienhoven from the Commission?’

  The answer was the same song, half a key higher.

  Becker dialled a number on his desktop phone. It was the landline number Hans Tamberg had given him in the hotel lobby. Six beeps, and still nobody had answered the phone. Then Becker punched the mobile phone number into the desktop phone. No need to pay for international calls out of your own pocket if it’s for work, he thought. There was no answer here, either.

  Then Becker checked his mobile phone’s call history and typed over the central switchboard number of the European Commission in Brussels. He called it and, like the day before, asked for a Willem Tienhoven from anti-fraud.

  A woman answered the phone. ‘Director Tienhoven’s office.’

  ‘Didier Becker, Luxembourg police. Can I please speak to Mister Tienhoven.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said. ‘Mister Tienhoven is in a meeting at the moment, but I will tell him to call you back.’

  ‘So he’s already feeling much better now, yes?’

  ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘Do you have my number?’, Becker asked.

  ‘I see your number on my display. Have a nice day.’ She hung up.

  Becker hung up, too. He wasn’t angry. He dialled another number, a local rather than an international one. Heavy obstacles required strong levers, that was all.

  ‘Becker here,’ he said into the receiver. ‘Can I speak to Jacques? I see, okay.’ He checked his new wristwatch. Oh, it was massive. ‘I’ll be back by that time, so I’ll just talk to him here. Thanks.’

  He hung up. Monsieur le chief prosecutor was in a meeting, but would come to the police headquarters for some other meetings later this morning, he’d just been told. So there’d be enough time to go talk to the security camera people, then return and catch the man before he’d leave the building again.

  Becker wasn’t worried too much that the chief prosecutor would try to avoid him, or would not be interested in his case. First, Jacques was almost a relative of his, more or less. Second, and more important, the case didn’t look very much like a suicide. It looked like murder, making it the second murder case in the first quarter of the year for the whole country. That meant the national murder rate had just been doubled in comparison to the statistical quarterly average of one. And this one wasn’t a homicide between already dubious criminals, like the last one had been, but a case with some political implications. Maybe it was the chief prosecutor who should seek an audience with Becker, not the other way around.

  Becker quickly checked his e-mails and his paper mail, found nothing urgent and got up to take his jacket off the hook. Just as he was about to leave the office, his phone rang. He hurried back and picked up the receiver. He smiled, recognising the young man’s voice before he had recognised the foreign number on the display.

  The young man said, ‘Happy birthday, dad.’

  ‘You too, I mean thank you. Thanks.’

  Becker sat back down.

  The divorce had ended his first family life, but it’d also been the beginning of his second. Becker had left his wife, but he hadn’t dumped their son on her. There’s no way I’ll have him all day, Monday to Friday, with all the day-to-day problems, so that you can have him on the happy weekends and take him to the zoo, she’d said. Their son would live with him, and she would do the fun stuff with him on weekends.

  He had gladly accepted it, but in the end this was not what had happened. His wife hadn’t wanted to see her own son only on weekends after all. So they’d split whole weeks. One week him, one week her.

  ‘Have you decided about the offers yet?’, Becker asked.

  ‘As usual,’ his son said. ‘The glory is in academic research. The money’s on the oil rigs in the North Sea.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’ll let you know. I’ll pick you up in a golden helicopter and tell you.’

  ‘Both things are very good,’ Becker said. ‘Just do them both, first one and then the other.’

  ‘I’ll call you on Sunday, okay dad?’

  ‘Yes, great. Bye.’

  ‘Bye.’

  In the end the daddy weeks had become longer and longer. During his teenage years their son had basically lived with his father, right until he’d finished school and moved out. It hadn’t always been easy. But it was the happiest family life Becker could remember having.

  Petten

  Hans greeted Siim and Clarissa as they came into the guesthouse kitchen. Hans had gotten up early, he had showered, used a deodorant spray he’d found on a shelf, and gotten dressed. He was still wearing yesterday’s clothes and underwear; he hadn’t wanted to borrow any of Siim’s. But that was a minor discomfort, just like the fact that he hadn’t brushed his teeth. He’d buy a toothbrush or chewing gum later. Now he was standing in the kitchen, welcoming them with fresh coffee he had made. Kenneth hadn’t come back from the meeting with his mystery relation. Hans would have heard him. He had barely slept.

  ‘Ah, thanks, perfect,’ Siim said, putting sugar into his coffee. He was wearing the boxer shorts and t-shirt in which he’d slept. His almost fiancée was wearing long pyjama pants and a t-shirt the length of a night gown.

  ‘Clarissa,’ Hans said, ‘I’d need to make a phone call. Can you please tell me how the phone works?’

  Clarissa smiled at him. ‘You first press 9, then you wait for the beep, then you press 0, and then you dial the number.’

  Hans went over to the phone he had tried to use earlier, and followed Clarissa’s instructions.

  ‘I have cookies in my car,’ Siim remembered. ‘I’ll be right back.’

  He gently touched Clarissa’s shoulder and left the kitchen. Clarissa took the first sip of her coffee.

  Hans dialled his boss’s number. After a click he heard Gabriela’s voice.

  He said, ‘This is Hans. Is Willem back yet?’

  He heard no reply, just a few clicking sounds. The
n he heard Tienhoven’s voice. It sounded weak, or hoarse perhaps.

  ‘Tienhoven.’

  ‘Good morning Willem, this is Hans.’

  A long pause.

  Then Tienhoven started talking, quietly, almost pleadingly. ‘Hans, I am sorry. I’m sorry I left.’

  ‘Why did you check yourself out of the hospital?’

  ‘I thought it was all going to be too much, I wanted to be at home.’

  What an odd way of saying it. ‘Well, it all has been a little too much for me, too.’ Maybe Tienhoven had also seen a bloody corpse in a toilet, and maybe he had also gotten beaten in the face and suffocated with chemicals. But Hans was pretty sure he had not.

  ‘Where are you now, Hans?’

  Although Tienhoven did have a heart attack, Hans thought, they say it’s very painful and frightening. But he needed information regardless of any of that.

  Hans asked, ‘What happened in the hotel?’

  ‘I really don’t know, Hans. There was the explosion and the commotion. I took a taxi and came back to Brussels.’

  ‘Did anyone visit you at the hospital?’

  ‘No Hans. I just left.’

  Hans had to make a choice. Maybe it was a gamble.

  ‘Willem, I’m following the nuclear theft. And right now I need help. Logistical assistance.’

  ‘The investigation is basically closed, Hans. Clarke said that there was nothing else to investigate. Zayek took his own life, and he took his manipulation of the nuclear reports with him.’

  Hans paused. He had never heard of anything like that before. The director-general didn’t just go around closing people’s investigations on his own; he normally received a final report first. And report or not, how could he have closed it? Zayek had died only yesterday, in extremely dubious circumstances, and the first thing Clarke does the next morning is to say everything is solved?

  Hans asked for precision. ‘What do you mean by “basically” closed?’

  ‘I mean that Clarke said it. I just had a meeting with him. Now he’s in more meetings all day, so I expect that we’ll receive the standard notification of the closure this afternoon.’

  ‘Do you share Clarke’s opinion?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I think. The closure comes from above.’

  Jesus, they were really putting an end to it. What was going on? On the bright side, Hans now had an approximate idea of how much time he had left to find out. There was no way he would just go back and sit around at his desk now, subjecting himself to so-called closures from above.

  So he said, ‘That means officially the investigation is still open. At least for another couple of hours, until the notification is issued. And that’s why I need assistance.’

  Tienhoven seemed only mildly surprised. ‘You want to check all those countries with the missing uranium before noon?’

  ‘There’s no time for that, is there. But I can do the Dutch side. I’m in Petten.’

  ‘What, at the reactor?’

  ‘My question to you is: do you know someone at the police of Rotterdam. Someone you maybe know from the old days.’

  Now we’ll see, Hans thought. Are we in business?

  There was a long wait. Finally Tienhoven replied, ‘There is a senior inspector named Visser. We used to work in Utrecht together, now he’s in Rotterdam. If you call him and tell him about me, he might help you, I hope. He should.’

  Hans turned around as he heard a knock against wood. It was Siim, he was standing in the open doorway, mutely showing him a black round object the size of a large, thick coin. There were chips of white paint on it.

  Siim said, quietly, ‘I just pulled this out of my car, it was buried in the metal above the rear tyre. I think it’s a tracking device.’

  A metallic clonk near the rear wheel on Hans’s side. Siim listened for a second. The tyres were all right.

  Hans said nothing. He was thinking. Thinking and deciding.

  Tienhoven asked, ‘Hans, are you still there?’

  ‘Willem, we’ll do it differently. You call your friend in Rotterdam. And you tell him that the European Commission is requesting urgent operational assistance in an ongoing investigation. The case is still open.’

  Hans put the receiver to his other ear, and continued, ‘The assistance consists of the following. I need access to shipping records from the Rotterdam port concerning a company in Vienna called A&C. And I need police protection when going there. Make them send a police car to the research centre compound to pick me up and to get me to Rotterdam. Okay?’

  A pause. ‘Okay. Where can I reach you?’

  ‘The research centre guesthouse. But don’t call to confirm. I’ll wait for the car, and unless you call I’ll assume it’s coming. We don’t have much time.’

  ‘Okay. And we’ll talk it all through when you’re back, yes? And Luxembourg police want to talk to you, too, they keep calling and I’m not supposed to call them back. It’s all a bit much right now.’

  ‘Goodbye Willem.’

  Hans put the receiver down.

  Luxembourg

  Becker’s lean limousine came to a stop in front of an unremarkable small office building, in a business park right outside Luxembourg city. This was the other side of the motorway belt, meaning that it was meant for firms that needed to be close enough to clients but whose business didn’t depend on customers strolling in spontaneously while shopping for clothes.

  He turned off the engine and made a point of not sighing before getting up. Instead he sighed afterwards. He shouldn’t have bought the ridiculous watch, he thought. He should have saved the money, and then some more money, and then he should have sold the car and bought a new one with high seats. And then he’d just use his private car for work, instead of playing the car fleet lottery every day. Again all the big ones had been taken.

  He approached the entrance. There were six company logos attached to the right of the door. One company name was more meaningless than the next; half of them featured the word ‘Solutions’. Six names, Becker noted, even though the building could have accommodated only four tenants. Two of the companies probably existed only on paper, each owning fifty percent of the other. But four of the companies looked real, in the sense that there were physical people sitting in physical offices selling goods or services. Whether the goods and services themselves were real was another question. Luxecur, the firm that was supposed to keep the hotel’s security camera footage, in any event didn’t always deliver what it sold.

  Luxecur, of course. Every other company in this country had the word ‘Lux’ in its name somewhere. Luxdogs, Luxcats, Luxwindowcleaners.

  The front door of the building wasn’t locked. The offices of Luxecur were on the ground floor to the left, opposite the offices of a firm called Analogue Solutions. Becker tried to open the glass door to the office itself, but couldn’t. There was a black box on the side, for people to hold their plastic badge against. Becker knocked on the glass. A woman came to the door and stopped without opening it.

  ‘Becker, police,’ Becker said, holding his police identification against the glass. ‘It’s about the hotel camera.’

  The woman nodded and opened up. He stepped inside. The room was modest bordering on the spartan. There were four workstations with computers, but only one of them was turned on. No posters or logos on the walls. There weren’t even any bulky computer servers he could see. As far as Becker could tell, the woman ran the show alone, and out of an empty office.

  He looked at her more closely. It had been hard to tell her age at first, because she was wearing oversized glasses with a plastic frame, which had a slightly distortive effect. But her face was young. Such glasses had been fashionable in the eighties, although young people probably didn’t know that, Becker thought. Or maybe they did, and this was deliberately retro.

  ‘What happened to the camera footage?’, Becker asked.

  They were still standing in the room, and the woman still hadn’t said anything. She stil
l didn’t open her mouth.

  ‘Okay,’ Becker said. ‘Let’s start again. My name is Didier Becker. What is your name?’ He frowned. ‘Do you even speak Luxembourgish?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ the woman said. ‘I cannot tell you much because our business is sensitive.’

  ‘What does that mean?’, Becker wondered.

  ‘It means you have to threaten to lock me up or disrupt the business if I don’t talk.’

  Who was this woman, and how old was she, really?

  Becker shrugged. ‘I’ll arrest you for obstructing a police investigation, and then a whole squad of policemen will come and take evidence, and they’ll unplug all your servers, and I’ll call the press and they will take pictures of policemen carrying computer drives out of your office.’

  The woman nodded. ‘We’ve had a security breach. Someone hacked into the servers and deleted the recordings. But only for the hotel in question, as far as we can tell, and only for that day. You understand that, as a security company, we don’t want to make this public. It could have affected anyone. Our server security is better than it is at your police building. Our business depends on it.’

  Becker ignored the part about the police servers. ‘Where are your servers?’

  ‘Not here, obviously. There is one somewhere in this country, its backup is in another European country, which has its own backup in a third country, which has its own backup outside of Europe.’

  ‘Does this mean you can breach it from outside Europe?’

  ‘You can breach it from anywhere. The backups only make copies of each other, the primary feed comes through here. But in order to breach it you have to be very good.’

  Becker thought for a moment. ‘Can the police recover it?’

  ‘The police can hire a contractor, and that will be a company like us,’ the woman said. She still hadn’t mentioned her name. ‘Maybe it will be us, full stop. If we can’t do it, practically no-one can. And we’ve been trying all night. My colleagues have left now.’ She pointed at the empty desks. ‘It’s gone.’